Basic SEO Strategies

I wrote this post in Spanish in 2021 and adapted it to English in 2026.

You'll find all sorts of things online if you run a quick search for "SEO strategies".

Everyone gives SEO strategies their own "name". Some say they invented them, others say they've been using them since '98 but kept quiet so nobody would copy them, and plenty more lies along those lines.

In the end, most SEO specialists, agencies and tools with blogs about SEO topics are doing marketing to sell you their courses, services and/or subscriptions to the tools they offer.

That's why they give SEO strategies quirky, funny names, among other adjectives: all to boost their branding, look like experts, and sell you whatever they want to sell you.

Let's face it, in the end that's what this is all about: selling online.

I'm not about to be left behind, so the SEO strategies I'll cover here will get rebranded by yours truly, to coin my own terms and try to boost my branding as an expert on the subject.

That said, I'll describe them in enough detail that you get more than a "broad strokes" idea of what I mean by each strategy.

I should point out that my specialty is building niche sites (with enough success to let me put together this free training of sorts), and the strategies I'll mention here (there are many more) are the ones that have worked best for me, with the best results.

One more thing: these SEO strategies are for building websites. There are SEO strategies for optimizing projects that are already live (on-page SEO strategies), others for improving your link profile (off-page SEO strategies), and tons more. I'll focus on the ones that work for building a niche site from scratch.

Without Further Ado, Here Are the SEO Strategies #

Shooting arrows in the dark

Of the 4 SEO strategies I'll cover, this is one of the "cheapest" to apply, and it's exactly what the name says: "shooting arrows in the dark".

SEO takes time, and to shorten the time before it starts producing results you have to invest money (focusing on creating quality content and links). But since niche sites are a gamble, you can't afford to throw money at every crazy idea you come up with.

What's the solution?

Again: "shooting arrows in the dark".

In more technical terms, what I mean is that with this kind of SEO strategy you just lower the quality of the websites you're building.

How do you lower the quality?

Here are some tips:

• Use the same template for every niche site you build.
• Hire the writing at the lowest possible price.
• Create short content (400 to 600 words) that satisfies a single search intent, and forget about encyclopedic articles.
• Use a seed website.

If you use the same template, you stop spending time on design decisions like the color palette or the template layout (where the featured image goes, comparison tables, etc.). It's a simple way to lower the quality of your niche sites.

Hire writers who charge little (careful: try to make sure they charge little because they're not very good yet, but that they deliver fast, because it can backfire if you're held up for a week or more waiting for the text). Back to them charging little: lots of freelance writers charge little when they're starting out, to get known (or for other reasons). Try to pay the minimum and get the maximum quality in return, and when you find the writer who does it best, marry them and keep hiring them for your texts.

When it comes to creating articles for a website, the advice you'll read on lots of SEO sites is that you need 5,000-word articles and other crap like that. That they have to be flawless, that they need to satisfy as many related search intents as possible, and so on.

Want me to tell you the truth?

They're right, and in fact that's the last technique I'll talk about in this post on SEO strategies...

That's the right way to do it, and also the slowest, in an industry that already takes about 8 to 13 months to show you the first results.

That's why shooting arrows in the dark is such an effective SEO strategy when it comes to building niche sites.

You don't invest as much time, and you start seeing sooner which niche sites are working and which aren't.

This technique has a very important second part: updating the URLs that are already working.

In other words, once you've hit good prey thanks to all the arrows you shot in the dark, it's time to go finish the job and bring that prey home.

In SEO terms, what I mean is that once you've made it into the top 15 for a keyword with one of these crappy URLs on a crappy website, you need to go and update that content, you know, "curate" it, so it actually satisfies the search intents. And since you know what's working, you make the most of the time you invest in that URL (otherwise you'd be spending time on something you don't know will end up working or not).

If the website starts ranking better for more and more keywords, a third phase would be improving the website's design (the template and the general layout of the articles) to boost the success you're having even more.

All of this while slipping in the occasional link. Because, let's face it, once you start getting clicks, you know you need to start working on off-page SEO strategies to improve your link building.

Kakashi, the copy ninja

This technique lives up to its name. For those of you who don't know who the heck Kakashi is, here's the short version: he's a guy with tons of talent who copies everything good he sees to use it for his own benefit.

In the SEO world, this means grabbing niche sites you see are working and copying them completely.

If possible, even the template and the color palette.

This kind of SEO strategy is about taking a niche site and copying its:

• URL structure
• Layout
• Content
• Links

The URL structure is how they've organized their content in terms of crawl depth and hierarchy.

In other words, which content they have at depth 1 and 2 (and deeper, if they have any), plus copying the URL nesting (if they have it) along with the URL structure (whether they include the category, the date, basically everything exactly as they have it, because if they're ranking there must be a reason).

Once you've copied the niche site and you see it start working, you can add optimizations wherever you think they make the most sense. But you do that properly once the clone is live, because if you do it before, you're "optimizing" based on your own beliefs, not on what the niche needs. This is very practical, and what works for one niche site may or may not work for others (even when they share a topic).

Just like the shooting-arrows-in-the-dark strategy, the Kakashi copy ninja technique has its own second part.

In the second part of this strategy, you start expanding the niche site, whether by curating content you've already published or creating new content, all aimed at knocking down the niche site you copied in the first place and improving your positions in the SERPs.

Rosie the robot

This is one of the best SEO strategies, and it's about using robots to build niche sites.

There are many kinds of automated websites and ways to build them, but I'll lump all the SEO strategies used to build them into this one, which I'm naming after Rosie, the robot maid from The Jetsons and the most efficient robot of all time.

Like I said, there are many ways to create automated websites, but in short these 3 are the most common:

• Content created with spintax
• Translated content
• Content created by spinning the content of an existing website

The first kind of automated website is super common: just put together keyword research with thousands of related keywords, build a spintax matrix, and then let a robot finish creating the content for each keyword you researched, from the spintax matrix you created in the first place.

The second kind of automated website (when you translate the content) is less common, and the reason is that most people do it wrong. Why? Because they end up translating content from websites originally in English and end up with crappy texts that don't rank for anything because of how badly they're translated. No matter how spectacular the API you use for the translation is, the semantic roots of the two languages are so different that in many cases the text ends up losing its meaning and structure by the time you're done translating.

The solution?

Know a little about languages...

I won't go on about it, because honestly I'm no expert on the subject, but I did notice one thing: Romance languages (all the languages rooted in Vulgar Latin) are closely related in structure and semantics, and translations between those languages come out spectacular.

A translation from Italian to Spanish comes out much better than one from English to Spanish, and the reason is that Italian has the same structure as Spanish, because both come from Vulgar Latin, and that's why the translation is better.

So keep this in mind when you use automated SEO strategies like Rosie by translating niche sites. In short: translate niche sites from and into related languages (English-German, Spanish-Italian, etc.).

Now that we're done with the linguistics class, let's get to it and carry on with the SEO strategies for translated niche sites.

If the niche site you're going to translate is already well structured, you translate it as is. If not, you have to put in the work on the URL architecture, clusters, etc.

Remember, the whole point of this strategy is getting cheap content (in theory it's "free", but since you have to invest some time producing it, free as in actually free, it isn't). You still have to do the rest of the SEO work that building a niche site involves, no matter what.

The last version of websites built with automated SEO strategies like Rosie is spinning the content of an existing website.

This is a lot like the Kakashi copy ninja SEO strategies. Only this time the content "paraphrasing" is done by a robot.

You can program the robot yourself, you can translate the text into English and use an API, or you can use tools like Parafrasit that already work decently enough in Spanish.

Here again, you do the SEO work no matter what. The trick with these SEO strategies is getting tons of content you can send to Google in bulk: whatever Google likes (meaning, whatever starts pulling in traffic) you keep, and whatever did nothing at all, you end up "pruning" and removing from the website.

For any version of the Rosie SEO strategy, you need to do a second part for each website and prune the content that didn't spin, translate or paraphrase well, so what did work can finally take off.

One more thing: on the best-performing URLs, you can remove the automatically created content and replace it with content made by hand, with as much care as possible, to boost their performance even more.

The stone castle

Of all the SEO strategies, I left this one for last for a reason: it's the most expensive by far.

It's about building a niche site from scratch, starting from seed keywords that give you a good number of related keywords that you'll have to filter and group into clusters, all by hand.

In other words, you push forward the hard way from the keyword research, and each website can take you a couple of months of work before it goes out to Google.

Does it make sense to use SEO strategies like this?

Of course. It's the most effective one: URLs rank faster, and you have to prune less content once everything is up and running.

The content has to be created by hand, paying as much as you can afford so it's high quality.

You have to invest time and money in the website template, the article layout, the logo, etc.

The downside of this kind of SEO strategy?

Niche sites are a lottery, and what works in some doesn't quite take off in others. So after all that effort you could end up with a website that cost you thousands of dollars to produce (in time and money) that never quite ranks and turns into a massive waste of time and money, which is very hard to absorb, especially when you're just starting out.

Although you can use this technique for niche sites, the truth is it's better suited to brand websites, meaning websites you want to rank as a reference, for a business or company and things like that, which can afford to wait a couple of years to start seeing results.

With niche sites, you need to see a pulse in the first week, or you're wasting time and resources you could be investing in other websites that respond at the speed you need to live off your passive income alone.

I'll wrap up this section on SEO strategies here, because I think the rest are just combinations of the ones I've told you about, whether as modified versions of these strategies or mixes of the ones I've shown you.